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This is a guest post by David Wilson, a PhD student in the Astronomy and Astrophysics group at the University of Warwick, where he studies the remains of planetary systems around white dwarfs (see below!). He can be found on Twitter and blogs about various astronomy topics at Stuff About Space.

White dwarfs are dead stars, the burnt out carbon cores of stars like our Sun which have exhausted their hydrogen fuel; incredibly dense, incredibly hot balls of matter roughly the size of the Earth. Because of their high temperature, tens of thousands of degrees, all white dwarfs glow blue.

But the light from GD 29-38 wasn’t just blue. When it was split into a spectrum, separated into a rainbow of separate colours, there seemed to be something else there. Something shining with an infrared light, beyond the range of our eyesight.

Initially the discovers were excited, as the red light could have come from an orbiting brown dwarf, a mysterious object several times bigger than a planet but much smaller than a star. But both the white dwarf and the infrared source were pulsating slightly, periodically getting brighter and dimmer. If the red light was from a separate object, then it shouldn’t have pulsed in time with the white dwarf.

An asteroid plummets to its doom around the white dwarf GD 29-38. Studying the debris left from these asteroids can reveal the chemical composition of exoplanets. Image Credit: NASA

The spectrum also revealed metals in the white dwarf’s atmosphere, heavy elements like calcium, magnesium and iron. These were also out of place, as white dwarfs have such a strong gravity that anything heavier than hydrogen or helium should have sunk down into their cores long ago. The metals must be falling onto the white dwarf from the space around it- but how did they get there?

It took until 2003 for the origin of the mysterious infrared glow to be found, during which time many more white dwarfs with similar red spectra and metal polluted atmospheres were found. The explanation was that the infrared light is coming from a disc of dusty debris surrounding the white dwarf.

This debris was formed from the wreckage of an asteroid, leftover from when GD29-38 was a Sun-like star with its own system of planets. The dust in the disc rains down onto the white dwarf, explaining the metals we see in the atmosphere.

The spectrum of GD 29-38. Along the bottom is its wavelength, or colour, going from blue on the left to invisible infrared on the right. The vertical axis shows how bright the white dwarf is at each wavelength. The difference between the blue white dwarf and red dust cloud can be clearly seen. Image Credit: NASA

The story of how the debris disc got there is a result of the turbulent formation of the white dwarf. As it runs out of fuel a star swells up to a huge red giant, then blows away roughly half of its mass in an immense stellar wind, leaving the tiny white dwarf core.

With the gravitational force at its heart cut in two, the system of planets around the dying star is thrown into chaos. Planets begin to migrate outwards, trying to reach orbits twice as far away from the central star as before. As they do this, they risk coming into close contact with each other.

Some of the planets survive these encounters and carry on as they are. Others, especially when a big Jupiter sized planet is involved, are thrown out of the system into the depths of interstellar space. And some are scattered into the centre of the system towards the white dwarf.

These unlucky asteroids and dwarf planets fall in towards the white dwarf until they reach a point known as the tidal disruption radius. There the tidal force, the difference in gravitational pull between the parts of the asteroid nearest the white dwarf and the areas further away, becomes so great that the asteroid is ripped apart, forming the dusty debris disc that we see as an infrared glow.

The discovery of this process lead to an important conclusion. As the dust rains down onto the white dwarf it becomes visible to our telescopes. If we can measure what metals there are, and how much of each there is, then we can reveal the chemical composition of the asteroid or planet that formed the disc. We can ask, and answer, the question: “What are planets made of?”

Two decades ago we only knew about the eight planets in our solar system (Pluto was never a planet, it was just mislabelled). Now we know of over a thousand planets, new worlds orbiting hundreds of stars. Through our telescopes we can measure the size of these planets, what their masses are, and even in some cases get a glimpse into their atmospheres.

But we can’t find out what they’re made of, what the geology of these newly discovered planets is like. This means that we don’t know for sure if the way that the rocky planets are built in our solar system, the particular mix of iron, oxygen, magnesium, silicon and other chemicals that make up the Earth and its neighbours, is the way all planets are built.

The metal polluted white dwarfs form a perfect laboratory, presenting us with rocky objects that have broken apart into their chemical components. By observing as many as we can, we can begin to explore the chemical diversity of planets and planetary systems. We can see if the way our planets are built is the normal way to construct a planet, or whether Earth is even more unique than we thought.

To date we’ve discovered around a dozen white dwarfs with enough chemicals to compare their systems in detail with our own. So far, they look fairly similar to the Earth, a hopeful sign. But we need many more to truly explore this area, and over the next few years myself and others will be scouring the sky, using the Hubble Space Telescope above us and an array of telescopes on the ground. We will find more metal polluted white dwarfs, measure the chemicals of the planetary debris around them, and begin to explore in detail what things you need to build a planet.

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Awards

Short-listed for the Wellcome Trust Science Writing Prize 2012:
For this article.

Welcome!

Astrobiology and the study of planets throughout the galaxy deal with some of the most profound questions regarding our existence: where did we come from, are there other worlds like ours out there, and are we alone?

I don't profess to be able to answer these questions, but that doesn't stop me from cobbling together some loosely coherent thoughts to share with interested readers. I find it helps me to maintain a cosmic perspective.

I completed a PhD in the Centre for Ocean and Atmospheric Science at the University of East Anglia in 2015, broadly focussed on planetary habitability, astrobiology, and global biogeochemical cycling on Earth.

I am also a committee member of the Astrobiology Society of Britain. Visit the ASB website for more information about astrobiology in the UK:

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